The invention concerns a method of producing rennet cheese from raw milk, wherein the milk can be purified with respect to internal and external contamination, standardized and delivered to the cheesemakers and wherein a biological reaction is terminated, a precipitant and cultures are added, and the cheese mass is separated from whey that contains cheese fines.
Denatured cheese fines (powdered casein) can be removed from the whey by separation or decantation.
The raw whey is introduced into a stack of disks in a clarifying separator at a point of powerful centrifugal force. The cheese fines are separated out and collect in a double-conical solids space of the separator. The fines are extracted in a concentrated and exploitable form by completely or incompletely emptying the separator in accordance with how much fines occur.
In the previously known methods of producing rennet cheese, the cheese fines are a true waste product whereas the clarified whey is intended for further processing.
In some cases the cheese fines are further processed into processed cheese or sold to processed-cheese factories. When such a procedure is not possible, the fines are usually released for use in animal feeds.
Large volumes of cheese fines are needed for economical further processing for the aforesaid conventional purposes. By the time enough fines have been collected, refrigeration, intermediate storage, and packaging have resulted in high costs. The quality of the fines is negatively affected by storage.
The producer can seldom command a decent price when reselling because the market trend is downward.
The production of rennet cheese results in cheese fines that contain so much calcium as to be impossible to reliquify without adding emulsifying salts. The calcium (Ca.sup.++) creates bridges between the casein micelles and accordingly impedes reliquification. Although the emulsifying salts do bond the Ca.sup.++ components enough to allow reliquification, the salts remain in the product and make it impossible to use the cheese fines even for producing processed cheese.